In 1875, a jury committed Mary Todd Lincoln to an insane asylum. This week, the Chicago Tribune reported that two Illinois State Supreme Court justices discovered her trial papers still on file with the Cook County Clerk! The Clerk’s Office will be donating them to the Lincoln museum, but we hope the story does not end there. Like many others, we’ve previously posted about the cultural heritage reflected in state court files. Some of the stories told in these documents are historically significant, like Mary Todd Lincoln’s commitment, or John Wesley Hardin’s murder trial (see this Texas Task Force report). Many stories, however, are just minor threads in life’s tapestry: divorces, probates, business disputes. Whether the story is big or small, the court records that tell it may be irreplaceable.
Each state’s preservation rules differ. Some place the retention determination in the hands of state libraries or archives, some issue mandatory retention schedules based on the nature of the action, and some afford the clerk of court discretion to dispose of files after prescribed time periods. Even if a clerk of court wanted to save everything, storage expenses and space constraints make this impossible. The costs of digitizing every paper record are prohibitive. As cultural institutions may not be interested in less noteworthy files, many are noticed for destruction. Provided that a state’s rules allow it, however, law libraries may be uniquely positioned to rescue these files — preserving not just the documents, but also state history. And if you spend some time digging through them all, you never know just what you might find…
